Rant – Dept. of Redundancy Department

 

That’s among my favourite sayings. It came to me via a former colleague and friend who also once quipped, “I resemble that remark!” (as opposed to “I resent that remark”). Both versions speak to truth – the latter sometimes speaks of defensiveness, which is (as often as not) a reaction to truth. People are most defensive when guilty. The first statement, “I resemble that remark,” was spoken in word play, but it encapsulates a truth worth attending to.

But I digress.

I couldn’t resist making the adjoining picture of the peculiar, ground level structure encountered on recent travels. I won’t divulge its location for fear of putting someone on the defensive. Anyone who has encountered the structure knows where it is anyway, and I want to use it as a metaphor in order to be sarcastic about something entirely unrelated. Maybe cynical is a better choice of word. The structure brought to mind a maze.

A typical maze or labyrinth is a challenging physical puzzle, often three-dimensional, as one might encounter in books or life-size in corn fields. The photograph is my take on some politics and some politicians. Life is like a maze which we enter and exit at the same spot despite the exertion expended in pursuit of problematic pathways (the truth of which lies within our grasp) without the need for an arduous journey.

Perhaps this maze illustrates Occam’s (or Ockham) razor wherein one chooses the smallest possible set of elements to achieve an outcome (thanks Wiki). Well that’s my truncated version.

I could refer to the ‘maze’ in my photo as Ockham’s maze. Its principle might also demonstrate the mathematical precept that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Like the structure in the photo, I’m not known for straight lines. I prefer puns. In poetry I prefer ironic puntametre.

I made the photo at first because I saw it as a kind of a joke about an attempt at a maze, maybe by someone who too literally followed a diagram sketched on a barroom napkin. But when it came time to write up a little something inspired by the photo, I found myself reflecting on it as a metaphor. And rather than a metaphor for stupidity it became a metaphor for futility.

I came to contemplate the multiple elements of the failed maze. A continuous boundary forms a low wall that surrounds a more intricate interior. That enclosed structure is more complicated, more interesting, but it’s constricted, it’s hemmed in, despite the fact that there are many more pieces, a majority.

Rather like us – like people: more complex and more pleasing but constricted, hemmed in by seemingly insurmountable fences that we are convinced protect us all.

=30=